Chuck was a member of the Nixon administration and described as the "hatchet man" of the Nixon White House, a man driven to do almost anything to advance the Nixon agenda. However, even with all that power and prestige, there was still an emptiness that was inside of him. And if wasn't until he met a friend who introduced him to Jesus and showed him what Christ can do in a person's life...it took time, but Chuck came to know the Lord as His Savior.
However his actions of the past before he became a believer would come back to haunt him and he was found to be indirectly linked to the Watergate break-in. And for those crimes, he would be found guilty and spend time in prison. Little did anyone know, that within those prison walls would come the greatest growing experience in Chuck's life. He found out what it meant to be a prisoner and the true hopelessness of being a prisoner was like. During this time the vision was given to Chuck to form a ministry to prisoners called Prison Fellowship. This ministry in it's four decades has grown to include many different outreaches, such as Project Angel Tree, where children of prisoners would be given gifts from different people, so that they would know that they had not been forgotten and Justice Fellowship, which advocates for judicial and prison reform.
But Chuck also became dedicated not only to the spiritual health of prisoners, but to Christians in general. He became an author of many books in which talked about different aspects of our walk with the Lord in relation to different areas of our lives. And to read Colson's works was not to be entertained, but to cause one to think and examine themselves. Some of the most memorable (at least in my opinion) were:
- Loving God- where he talked about what it meant to really love God (one of the things that sparked my interest, was where he talked about the word "radical", that the original meaning of the word was "to get to the root of"...and as believers were we getting back to Christianity the way Jesus meant it to be?)
- The Body (and it's rewrite Being the Body), Chuck talks about what the church is supposed to be (and has my all-time favorite quote-one that I wish all of us as believers would adopt these days:
"The role of the church is not to make men and women happy; it is to make them holy"
- Kingdoms in Conflict (rewritten as God and Government) a look as the boundaries we have as believers between faith and politics (the chapter that got my interest was the on the untold story of the revolution that deposed Ferdinand Marcos- and a couple of things that speak to me in these times that we are living-that when God wants to punish a nation, he gives them unjust leaders (such as the one we have now?) and COR-C-Conversion, a life changed through repentance and forgiveness from God; O-offering of obedient lives to God; R-reparation, an indication of a changed life)
His dedication to the spiritual health of the church led him to deliver a daily commentary on events of the day called "Breakpoint" where he would mention about different what was happening and show us from a Christian viewpoint what our response should be. It led him to be one of the founders of the Manhattan Declaration (http://manhattandeclaration.org/home.aspx) born out of an urgent concern about growing efforts to marginalize the Christian voice in the public square, to redefine marriage, and to move away from the biblical view of the sanctity of life.
To say that one man's life can make a difference in this case may be an understatement. But I hope that we can all learn from Chuck's life and decide in one way or another to think about our spiritual walk and how each of us can become better believers....
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